Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer

With the objectivity and insight of a scholar, the compassion and curiosity of an educator, and the love and admiration of a daughter, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot recounts the extraordinary life of her mother, Dr. Margaret Morgan Lawrence, one of the first African-American women to graduate from Cornell University and Columbia University School of Medicine to become a physician. Born in 1914, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, she was the only child of an Episcopalian minister and was raised in the protected environment of the middle class. Margaret's journey began as a teenager when she traveled north to live in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance and found herself under the strong influence of the women in her mother's family, who helped her find conviction in her dreams. After graduating from medical school at Columbia, she went on to become a mother and an activist, and to establish a brilliant career as a child psychiatrist in New York. Balm in Gilead captures both the life of an inspiring woman and the social, cultural, historical, and psychological forces that shaped the destinies of four generations of African-American women and their families.